How can we improve Azure Search?

Provide a local emulator or increase the number of indexes on the free tier for development use

It sucks that if I have more than 3 indexes I have to create a paid tier for development. We do not need performance or size. Just more index to simulate the production environment which contains more indexes.

Local emulation is absolutely essentially in order to avoid treading on each other's toes using a shared instance. There is local emulation for pretty much all major storage engines, such as CosmosDB and SQL Server.

It would be great to have a local emulator for Azure Search, one important reason is in cases where you need to develop POCs first and there are security concerns or data is not allowed to go out of the company network